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The only thing that I would change about it would be to have a large covered deck surrounding the house at the top level to be able to have a hammock or quests outside in the event that you entertain. I would also extend the porch and cover it more with a larger roof area to keep rain and other detrimental weather from getting to the people below. Also, I would be sure to include a grounding system on the room to keep your house from getting struck by lighting. As it stands now you’re one big lighting rod and I’ve personally seen huge trees split in half by a bolt of lighting.

Hey Donald: In answer to your question: “What happens as the tree grows bigger?”, this is how my company factors that into the equation.

Let’s say that I’m hired to build a 2nd floor deck around an ancient apple tree (which we have, many, many times). I factor in the growth rate of the girth for each year; usually for a “normal” tree, it’s 1/2″ per year. When we’re building the deck, we do “cut-outs” around the trunk, leaving an open area of up to 2″ in ALL directions of the circumference of the trunk. BUT…and this is a HUGE BUT…we then tell the home owner, we will be “Calling and inspecting the deck each year, to see how fast the trunk(s) are growing.” When the trunk/branches get 1/2″ to the wood deck, we then take a jigsaw and cut out another 2″ around the perimeter.

All it takes is a well-educated client and a pro-active architect to keep this going for decades. Hope this answers your question. 🙂

Michael wrote: “As it stands now you’re one big lighting rod and I’ve personally seen huge trees split in half by a bolt of lighting.”

How well I know that sad story. 🙁 We bought our cottage 15 years ago, in part, because of the 110 year old Silver Maple that was 5 stories tall and canopied over 1/2 an acre. In the September of 2001 (yes, THAT 2001), while we were vacationing in Maine, a massively destructive wind storm blew through our area of Michigan and split our cherished “baby” right down the middle like a stalk of celery. We were so destraught, we had to decide whether or not to even keep the cottage, since the tree and the kitchen were the TWO reasons we bought it. Oh, and we counted the rings on the trunk, that’s how we know the age. 🙁

Fortunately, the split stopped 8′ above ground level, so we hired a tree house builder in our area and he used quite a bit of the timber from the damage to construct a tree house that seats 6, with a walk up staircase to the tree house. It is a magnificent place to bird, read, or just escape ?whatever?, and as you can imagine, our grandkids are quite keen on it, too, but they have to wrestle it away from the adults. LOL